ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Roth: Live Up to the Deal

Former Orange County Supervisor Don R. Roth is again walking the ethical and legal tightrope.

This time the issue is the conditions of his probation, and the district attorney’s office is right to be looking into the matter.

Roth resigned from the Board of Supervisors last March and pleaded guilty to seven violations of the Political Reform Act that involved illegal gifts from business people. He was fined $50,000, sentenced to perform 200 hours of community service and put on probation for three years. Now, it turns out, he has crossed the line of propriety in all three areas of his sentence.

First, he tried to fulfill his obligation of community service by merely organizing a benefit golf tournament. Only after prosecutors objected did he agree to do some light construction work on behalf of two nonprofit groups.

Later he held a fund-raiser to “help assist me to retire my political debt”--which in actuality was his criminal fine.

Now Roth’s compliance with the probation is being questioned, and again the former county official just doesn’t get it. He seems to be striving to meet only the technical requirements of probation; even if he and his lawyer are right in saying that his actions do not violate the conditions of his sentence, he clearly is violating their spirit.

At issue is Roth’s introduction of a Fullerton businessman to officials of the Orange County Transportation Authority. The businessman wanted funds for research into battery-powered buses. He met Roth, who was on the OCTA board for two years when he was a county supervisor, and Roth set up two meetings with OCTA officials for the businessman and even sat in on them.

The businessman said Roth was not paid, and Roth’s lawyer said that even if he had received money he is not barred specifically from lobbying local agencies. However, a deputy district attorney said that Roth indeed was barred from lobbying for four years “at all levels.”

It is hard to conceive of the plea-bargain agreement in this case not covering local lobbying, because local officials are the people whom county supervisors know best.

Roth’s fellow supervisors previously acknowledged that his actions and guilty plea damaged trust in government. Now he’s treading dangerously close to mocking the judicial system. He should stop skirting the border of the rules and, in the fullest sense, live with the sentence imposed by the court.